More than 250 people – shopkeepers, café owners, the ladies from the bakery and supportive local residents – are crammed into the beer garden of The Eagle, their local in Battersea. These independent traders and their customers have turned up to save their small shops and a way of life.

There can be few gay, transvestite collectors of antiques and historic knickknacks who led a more remarkable life than Charlotte von Mahlsdorf who died in 2002. She - or to be precise he - somehow survived the predatory attentions of Nazis, the Second World War and the dreaded East German secret police, the Stasi.